Somehow finding time for crafts!

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I love giving food as gifts (partly because I’m poor and have a HUUUUGE family) but also because who doesn’t love receiving tasty treats, especially at Christmas?!

Here are some of my favourite food gifts to give out at Christmas, for the most part these ideas are things you can make in bulk and give out to family and friends, great if you’re visiting lots of people over the festive season!

Chocolate Bark is another super easy, fairly cheap to make option. You can make grown up versions with tasty nuts and dried fruit and a kid’s version with jelly beans or popping candy. Hey who am I to judge? Make whichever one you think your family and friends will enjoy most!

I made the cake in a tall 8 inch cake tin and then cut it into three layers. The cake recipe includes a recipe for ganache that was more than enough for me to fill three layers of cake and cover the top and sides to attach the chocolate.

I used about 4 “Sharing” packs of Maltesers and 4 “Sharing” packs of crunchy M&Ms. The cake took 15 4 finger Kit Kats to cover the sides. You can buy multi packs of 4 finger Kit Kats. I think they come in packs of 8 so you’ll need at least two packs, I bought three to be on the safe side, never hurts to have some spare chocolate at the end!

Now for the magic…

To get your anti-gravity effect you could use a special metal anti-gravity cake kit like this one that Lakeland sells.

Not the greatest quality photo since my brother’s birthday was a Wednesday night and I was trying to get the decorating part done between arriving home from work at 7 and going out for dinner at 7:30!

You can buy the straws in packs of 45 from Amazon here for a couple of quid. I only used 2 for this cake and around 15 for the wedding cake so I’ve still got loads left!

I basically shoved the straws into the cake at 45 degree angle and then coated the outside with ganache using a palette knife and attached the sweets. Note the maltesers are really flipping easy to attach since they’re so light. The M&Ms… not so much. I actually have a real dislike of M&Ms after trying to get them to stick to the straw for this cake 🙈 All it takes is a little bit of patience and time, neither of which I had in the 30 mins I had to complete this!

After we got back from dinner we did candles:

Yes that does read Happy Bday… life’s too short to try and find the missing alphabet candles at 10 pm!

Overall I’m happy with how this turned out given how little time I had to spend on it!

If you’ve got a big dog (or even just a dog larger than a pug) and you like to craft then you know the struggle of finding fun DIY things to make for them. It’s like the craft world decided that only small dogs like being dressed up or something! Below is a collection of DIYs I’ve found that are either created with larger breeds in mind or are easily adapted to them.

Once upon a time, Jade and Dave decided to get married. Jade asked me if I could make their wedding cake. I said yes, I’d love to. I spent several months failing to find a red food colouring that was bake stable (you lucky Americans!) as the original plan was to have a red velvet cake. I spent some time perusing the internet for alternative recipes and found an awesome Madeira cake recipe on Cakes, Bakes & Cookies that included how to scale the recipe for different sized tins which I desperately needed!

I did a test run with my 12 inch cake tin and it turned out OK:

A little cracked and the mixture wasn’t as light as I wanted it to be. I decided this was down to the fact that I was using my mum’s food mixer that was a wedding gift 37 years ago! I got a new mixer and it made all the difference!

I did a two tier test run using a 10 inch and an 8 inch cake:

I used cheap blue and red fondant from Tesco to test out the bunting. I also tested how sturdy the stacked tiers were:

I used jumbo straws instead of dowelling (and failed to get a pic of it) but there is a great YouTube tutorial here

For my two tier test run, the top tier had buttercream and lemon curd sandwiched between the layers while the bottom tier had buttercream and strawberry jam. I took half of the ten inch cake and the whole 8 inch cake into work. Despite my team’s incredible capacity for eating food, I had to enlist people from the wider business to help eat all of it!

So two weeks before the big day I assembled all of my ingredients:

Total ingredients I used for three tiers:

Butter: 948 g

Stork (Margerine): 948 g

Caster sugar: 2,526 g (~2.6 kg)

Vanilla Essence: 13.5 tsp

38 eggs (Words cannot describe how difficult I found it to work out how many boxes this worked out to… 1 x 12 egg box, 2 x 10 egg box and 1 x 6 egg box!)

Plain flour: 2,847 g (~2.9 kg)

Baking Powder: 20 tsp

Hot Water: 36 tbsp (640 ml)

4.5 kg of White fondant icing

Note that I made two of the 12 inch cake to make the cake tall enough.

I spent a weekend baking all 4 cakes which became three tiers and then froze all of the cakes. I followed the advice here for freezing the cakes.

The day before the wedding I defrosted, cut, filled, crumb coated and covered the cakes in white fondant. That took about 8 hours! I then cut out all of the bunting using these cutters. I used the largest one for the 12 inch tier and went down a size for each tier up.

I covered the cake board with white fondant and used hessian ribbon around the edge to go with the rustic barn theme.

Obviously Apple helped:

I love how Bunny is also looking wistfully outside

And here it is:

I am so genuinely touched that Jade and Dave would trust me with such a major part of their big day. Which they know because I had a small breakdown during their speeches! I got a gorgeous gift that I will definitely use a lot:

(T Swiz references win every time!) And I can only hope there is one photo of the speeches on the day that doesn’t have my ugly crying face in the background!

I haven’t died. Just had the craziest 6 months of my life. Blogging would probably have helped me process a lot of the stuff going on in my life but I didn’t have the energy.

So here we are, what’s changed?

I moved house. Now I live with my parents and my 17 year old brother. It is equal parts great and frustrating.
27 year olds are not meant to co-exist with their parents for long periods of time.
6 months down, 9 months to go.

I sorted my finances out.

I swapped my car for an automatic because point 1 above comes with a 110 mile round daily trip to the office. Meet Felix McFordface:

Felix

I’ve improved my health. Not as drastically as I might like but I’ve lost a stone in 3 months and improved my overall fitness so I’m happy if I continue as I am.

June was a crazy month for me. I attended 2 Hen Do’s and the wedding of one of my dearest friends. The UK voted to Leave the EU (I still cannot grasp this.) I went to Boston with work. I started June in a relationship and ended it single.

Crafts wise I’ve been focusing on the biggest thing I’ve ever done. Making a wedding cake for one of my best friends. The wedding is this weekend and I am definitely not freaking out. Photos and a how I did it post to come!

So now you’re all up to date, I’ve got a fair number of projects lined up and some posts in the pipeline so I promise not to wait 6 months to post again!

I recently caused much excitement/jealousy at work when I arrived with a fancy new breakfast container:

I love how excited we all got about it. You wish you could be as cool as us.

I got mine from Asda but they don’t appear to be selling them anymore. I did however find them on the Dunelm Mill website so you may still be able to get your hands on one.

The lid essentially unscrews and has it’s own separating lid that means the top part can be used for one thing and the bottom half for something else. It’s dishwasher proof including the spoon.

The great thing about it is that you don’t just have to use it like I do for yoghurt and granola. You can use it for things like porridge with toppings in the separate compartment instead as the silicone grip protects your hand from anything hot that you put in it.

Now that I’m commuting an hour and a half to work everyday I needed something that would keep my breakfast safe without me needing to hold it. Particularly since I really love my Ralph Lauren handbag and would rather not have to try and clean yoghurt out of it! I usually add frozen strawberries to the top of my yoghurt which melt on the way and keep the yoghurt nice and cool. The cup slots nicely into the holder in my car next to my tea until I can get to work.

Once I had my fancy cup I needed some fancy granola. I could have spent a fortune on an organic one from the supermarket but I thought I’d rather make my own!

I found this recipe by Zainab at blahnikbaker.com which I’ve then tweaked to get the recipe below. The key difference is that I used honey rather than maple syrup and had to improvise on the unsweetened apple sauce!

You will need a blender to create apple purée from your apple. If you don’t have one, it’s worth having a look in the baby food section of large supermarkets to see if you can find unsweetened apple purée. I could not find this ingredient anywhere but my choice was quite limited by the size of supermarket I was in at the time.

Steps:

Preheat the oven to 180°C or Gas mark 4.

Peel and core your apple and use your blender to create apple purée, measure out 3/4 cup and put to one side.

In a large bowl, whisk the oats, pumpkin seeds, almonds and spices together.

In a small saucepan set over medium heat, warm the apple purée, maple syrup and vanilla extract.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until well combined.

Spread the granola evenly onto a lined baking sheet and bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown (I had to do this in two batches to get an even layer).